Word: dull
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...short even of major works by women whose historical significance has been admitted for decades. Its inaugural show, American Women Artists 1830-1930, consisted mainly of loans; but even so, except for some paintings by Cecilia Beaux, Romaine Brooks and, of course, O'Keeffe, it was a dull florilegium of derivative kitsch. Who would waste ten minutes on these sub-Sargent portraits, these mincing imitations of Childe Hassam, these genre scenes crawling with dimpled rosy brats, if they had not been painted by American women? And what serious artist wants gender to be the primary classification...
...Where do -- where can -- Ollie and wife go from here? The movies end with a fade because to show what follows is to demystify what precedes. Imagine Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly raising chickens and changing diapers in a High Noon sequel (Quarter to Four ?). You can't. "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished," laments Tennyson's Ulysses after his return home from heroism to sit "by this still hearth, among these barren crags...
...ideal world, the mass market's appetites for fiction would be satisfied by the likes of Mrs. Randall; it's conservatively written without being dull, covers almost as much territory as a Michener novel, is shorter, and won't make a literate reader cringe every third page...
...When Jan van Riebeeck disembarked at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to establish a supply station for Dutch East India Company vessels en route to India, he found nobody except a few brown-skinned nomads whom the Dutch called Hottentots. Van Riebeeck described these aborigines as a "dull, rude, lazy and stinking nation," and most of them subsequently died in an epidemic of smallpox, brought on a company ship from India. To do the heavy work, the Dutch settlers, who were soon joined by a number of Germans and French Huguenot refugees, brought in slaves, mostly from Madagascar...
...Shakespeare, which Jarry did better. Jarry's Ubu Roi, a scatological lampoon of Macbeth, caused riots in 1893 Paris. At best, Durang's version, featuring a padded Thomas Derrah murdering every one in sight and a cannabalistic bouillabaise, can only imitate Jarry's effects; at worst it is only dull. But as Mrs. Sorken says, "If you don't like it, let your mind wander...